Journalists in glass houses target Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband with partner Justine Thornton at the Labour conference last month. Coverage of the couple's property suggested they had remained unmarried primarily to avoid capital gains tax. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

Skipping through the property pages of the Evening Standard on Wednesday I came across a piece about Ed Miliband and his house. It was easily the most interesting thing I've read about him; it held my attention for most of the tube journey. Underneath the headline "Mint it like the Milibands", it recounted how the Labour leader had used the laws of property and inheritance to "pave his way to an impressive home in a sought-after location in north London, now believed to be worth £1.6m."

The story was complicated – I had to read it again when I got home – but the facts seemed secure. I recognised it as a "good story" and wondered why the Standard muffled its impact by presenting it on page 38 as a tutorial on the property ladder. In this, I was naive: the Mr Magoo of the British media. The story had made its far splashier debut a few days before in the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday, one or other of which may have had it as a scoop, to be followed up in Monday's Telegraph and probably other papers too. As I get my news mainly from the Guardian and the BBC, it had entirely passed me by.

Briefly, for those of you who live on the same sheltered planet as me, it goes like this. Marxist academic Ralph Miliband owned a house in Edis Street, Primrose Hill. At some point after he died in 1994, his widow and two sons signed a "deed of variation" to his will that gave Ed and David each a 20% share in the house, which meant that on their mother's death they would pay inheritance tax only on the remaining 60%. Mrs Miliband also gave David a ground-floor flat around the corner in Chalcot Square that she'd bought for her mother in 1981. David moved in, then he and Ed bought leaseholds on the two floors above for about £100,000 a floor. David lived on the first two floors, and Ed on the third. Then jointly they bought the freehold on the whole Chalcot Square house.

In 2004, when he was married and about to adopt the first of his two children, David decided he needed more room. The solution lay in Edis Street. He bought out the 80% owned by his mother and brother for £800,000 and his mother switched homes to David's Chalcot Square flat. Ed's share of the deal is thought to be at least £160,000, on which he paid capital gains tax. In 2005, he sold his Chalcot Square flat for £342,000, and the next year bought another flat in the same area for £650,000, which he sold soon after for £740,000 to move into a house a mile or so away in Dartmouth Park that had been bought by his partner, lawyer Justine Thornton. Thornton's own rise up the ladder of north London's expensive brick and stucco was also detailed in the reports, but the point they most anxiously made was that the house was entirely hers and that, as she and Miliband were unmarried, they could nominate two houses as their primary residences instead of the one allowed to married couples. Primary residences are exempt from capital gains tax.

Miliband, therefore, could own a separate house and not pay capital gains when he sold it. No evidence was offered that he does have a second home posing as a first. Nonetheless, one or two hard-working reporters uncovered the history of his home ownership, and newspapers, employing loaded phrases such as "tax ruse" and "shrewd", conveyed the impression of a ruthless moneymaker, so keen to make a buck that it was the prospect of capital gains tax rather than any more personal consideration that prevented his marrying the mother of his child. "The pair have legitimately avoided more than £135,000 in capital gains tax on the sale of three properties by being unmarried", wrote the Sunday Times, implying, without going into the maths, that this had been deliberate policy earlier in their relationship when they kept separate flats. (Sexual partners stay unmarried for all kinds of reasons. Was capital gains tax the impediment to de Beauvoir and Sartre?)

Despite its array of prices and dates, the story disclosed no wrongdoing. What it described was an individual example of a social fact: that the Miliband brothers are part of a class that has been lucky in all kinds of ways and clever enough in some. Lucky to have inherited property in a desirable area; lucky it became even more desirable after Jude Law and Jamie Oliver moved in; lucky to buy into a rising market; clever enough to have understood how inheritance tax works, though hardly especially clever because the personal finance pages of the papers that published the story give their readers the same advice most weeks ("How good tax planning can benefit your children").

As I say, I read it twice. In our profoundly money-conscious era, the voyeuristic pull of peering into the property assets of others is hard to resist: several TV series have been built on it. According to the Mail, the brothers' mother has another house in Oxfordshire worth £750,000. The exclamation "And her a socialist too!" didn't need by this stage to be declared – hypocrisy had already been established as the main charge against Ed, who, while warning the Labour conference that the gap between rich and poor in Britain "harms us all", was in the Sunday Times's verdict "as canny a player of the property market as any other ambitious middle-class homebuyer".

The contradiction between the public belief and private self-interest of the left-inclined middle-classes has always been a favourite coconut shy, sometimes justifiably. The Labour party has never contained many Gandhians, practising as they preached, and these days you would look a long way among people of any kind to discover a lifestyle that has genuinely renounced consumerism or the husbanding of private property. One need only examine oneself. Like Miliband, though long before him, I was lucky to buy a house in London that's now worth … not quite as much as Miliband's. This week the Halifax published figures that showed the biggest monthly fall in house prices since 1983. In general terms, this has to be a good thing. British homes are still crazily overvalued when weighed against average earnings and need to be made more affordable. Still, thinking of how much my own house may one day provide to my children, I didn't rejoice.

For all these reasons, the Guardian was probably right to ignore a story that charged Miliband with greed and hypocrisy. But, by the same standard, it may have been wrong to publish a front-page item on the dress Samantha Cameron wore for her husband's Tory conference speech, quantifying the price (£749) as the equivalent of 36.8 first-child benefit payments. Doesn't the paper promote clothes that are just as pricey on its fashion pages? How much do the editor's suits cost? May we know how much anti-Tory columnist X or Y paid for her boots?

When politicians and journalists descend from their pulpits they enter the most fragile of glass houses. All of us need to take care.

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